The End of the Sentence Read Free Page A

return, regardless. The house will have told you that you have no choice in the matter, being bound by blood and vow. I would tell you that I am sorry for this, but I will not lie. The truth becomes a large thing, when one is imprisoned for a falsehood.
    Take care of my house, Olivia, and it shall take care of you.
    Yours, waiting, 
     
    Dusha.
     
    My dreams that night were not comforting.

5.
     

    In the night, awakened by the sound of letters falling in the hall, I rifled through the desk in the bedroom. Something insisted I look there. Top drawer, beneath the drawer liner. How quickly I’d grown used to envelopes filling every passage, to a house feeding me and putting me to sleep like a child. I thought it possible I might still be dreaming on the bus from Louisiana, jostled among suitcases and other sleepers. The envelope I found wasn’t sealed, and it was different from the rest. Not a prison stationery, this one, but something finer.
     
    January 12 th , 1956
     
    Dear Mr. or Mrs. Dusha Chuchonnyhoof:
     
    There is no one of any of those names at this address. No one named Marvel. No one named Eugene. My dear husband Paul is recently deceased, and if you’re looking for him, you should consider your manners and respect my time of grieving.
    I’ve telephoned the prison. Your appeals have been overturned. They said it was my duty to tolerate and provide comfort to prisoners if I could, and I shall not tolerate your correspondence. I’m a Christian woman. Though I find myself reduced in circumstances, I do not deserve this torment in addition to my bereavement. 
    The people next door aren’t nice people, and perhaps they’re the ones you’re looking for. I’m not the type of woman who gets letters from a prison, and I DO NOT APPRECIATE YOUR CHEEK. 
    I will not do what you demanded in your last letter, nor will I do what the letters sent by your pranksters ask me to do. I’m not a Weyland but for marriage. I’m a Jones from Reno. 
    I’m told you’re to go to the gas chamber, and good riddance. I don’t know why they’ve not sent you there yet. Whatever crime you committed, the time you’ve spent there means it was something terrible-  
    I will pray for your soul and that is all.
     
    Yours,
     
    Yours truly,
     
    Your own,
     
    The letter ended with a jagged line of ink, deeply scored into the page. 
    It was handwritten, in stationery embossed at the top with the name Mrs. Paul Weyland, and an address crossed out at the bottom, and replaced, by hand, with this one. At the very bottom, a smashed insect, a mosquito there sixty years. I shook the paper and watched the dust crumble, then turned my head to look at the graffiti arrow tagged from the bedroom doorway to the rectangle painted on the wall. 
    A door, it suddenly occurred to me, and then I wished it hadn’t. This one wasn’t iron. This was only paint. 
    But it was a rendering of a door, with a crude star-shaped knob. I touched it with my fingertips, and felt the edge of the paint. Enameled. I resolved to go into town to buy some clean white latex to cover the thing over the next day. I had a little money. Enough for that. 
    Nothing in the house protested or directed me. Silence, but for the arrival of letters, one every few hours. I moved around the bedroom, looking at the door that wasn’t a door, and at last, I slept again, dreaming of a prison, everyone in it wearing black and gray stripes, a gas chamber deep in a maze of corridors. I dreamed toward sunup of Mrs. Paul Weyland. “Yours, Yours truly, Your own.” It made me nervous, that thought, that someone here might have forced her into such a promise. 
    Letters arrived all night, rattling the door in such a way that I got used to it, just as I’d begun to get used to everything else, the bed, the food, the bath. I didn’t read any more of them. 
    Bad dreams bleeding into the sunrise. My brain was dull with broken sleep and things I’d seen in movies. (What door? Where was it?